Politics of blaming Obama on Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin is the one who moved troops into Crimea — but to Republicans, President Barack Obama is the one to blame.

GOP lawmakers have been out in force pointing the finger at Obama for a lack of leadership. Democrats, meanwhile, bemoan the partisan comments but have not been defending the White House’s handling of the situation in Ukraine.

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What politicians in the U.S. say in opposition — or don’t say in support — matters in Moscow, said Michael McFaul, who just returned from three years as Obama’s ambassador to Russia.

McFaul said what’s going on now reminded him of September, when Obama pushed for military strikes against Syria and was rebuffed by a sudden eruption of anti-interventionism, first by the GOP but joined by Democrats. People in Putin’s circle sneered to him about the president’s problems on the Hill, McFaul said.

“They most certainly saw that as a constraint on the president’s powers,” McFaul said. Obama’s “weakness was not about his assessment of Russia. His weakness was about democratic constraints on what he could do — that Putin does not face.”

It’s not like American politicians have a history of having only one view of international affairs. For years under President George W. Bush, Republicans often returned to the argument that Democrats opposing his plans in Iraq and Afghanistan were comforting the enemy.

To the frustration of this White House, though, the attacks on Obama’s commitment and resolve aren’t like anything Bush ever faced from Democrats — including the last time Putin went into a former Soviet territory, in Georgia in 2008. Whatever happened to national unity in a crisis, a senior administration officials wondered Wednesday, arguing that the political divisions send a mixed message to Putin and other world leaders who are gauging the strength of the United States’ resolve on Ukraine.

Critics are attacking Obama for not doing some of the very things he already is doing, the official said, and any suggestion that Obama is responsible for Russia’s actions — which they say facts don’t support — essentially amounts to “Putin-boosterism,” the official said.

“The fact that people are using this to politicize makes me very discouraged,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It disrespects both the office of the president and the Ukrainian people if we’re in the middle of the crisis for people to be immediately taking political potshots instead of trying to solve the crisis.”

Another committee member, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), argued that there’s no need for Democrats to be out there defending the administration or advocating on Obama’s behalf. Americans know that the president is in touch with Putin and other leaders and that the White House is doing all that it can and should be doing, Cardin said.

“The facts speak for itself,” Cardin said. “The president has done what I think Americans want him to do.”

That’s in the face of intense Republican attacks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made what amounted to gracious comments on the Senate floor Wednesday, saying of the president, “We’ll support him however we can to ensure a satisfactory outcome for the Ukrainian people, and to prevent this conflict from escalating into a wider war. They deserve our support.”

Of course, a couple of sentences earlier, McConnell recalled that he’s been talking for years about how Obama had eroded America’s place in the world, and concluded with a challenge: “This is a moment when President Obama is going to have to lead.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) lit up the Internet by saying that the lack of a stronger response to the Republican obsession of Benghazi was enough to “invite this type of aggression.”

“In Ukraine, we’re seeing the direct consequences of a failure of American leadership,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Tuesday, criticizing Obama for receding from the world, abandoning allies and failing to show resolve either toward supporting the protesters in Kiev or standing up to the Russians.

Putin, Cruz said, “has taken the measure of President Obama and has determined that he has nothing to fear from the United States, and that is why he is proceeding with impunity.”

“Think of it as being chess played on three boards, stacked one above the other. At the bottom board is the military piece. On the middle board is the economics and energy piece. On the top board is the diplomatic piece,” Clark said. “For the Republicans to say [Obama] isn’t being tough enough — that’s a very oversimplified argument, and it could get you in a lot of trouble.”

Asked whether he thought it was a problem for the White House that more of the president’s allies weren’t making that argument, Clark said, “I hope it does get out there.”

Beyond that, McFaul said, the whole idea that Putin sees Obama as weak is just wrong. On the contrary, the former ambassador said, the Russian president continues to demonstrate that he’s responding out of an outsize sense of menace from Obama — reflected in Putin’s comments at a Tuesday news conference about the United States feeling “like they’re in a lab and they’re running all sorts of experiments on the rats without understanding consequences of what they’re doing.”

Obama, McFaul said, doesn’t underestimate Putin. But just like Bush in Georgia, or going further back to when the Soviet Union declared martial law in Poland during Ronald Reagan’s presidency or sent tanks into Hungary during Dwight Eisenhower’s, the White House’s options tend to be limited, no matter how outrageous the Kremlin’s decisions.

“[Putin] believes that President Obama — the United States — is seeking to foment revolution around the world against regimes that are unfriendly to the United States,” McFaul said. “He thinks that he was defeated by President Obama in Ukraine. That’s not an assessment that Obama is weak. That’s an assessment that we are actually a threat to his interests.”